Aurich Lawson
David Brown, Amazon’s Vice President of EC2, runs through a skit with Filmic CEO Kevin Buonagurio sketching the company’s evolution from running Mac Minis on wire shelves in a closet to macOS instances in Amazon EC2.
Amazon Web Services and Apple have partnered to bring modern cloud-provisioning capabilities to the macOS platform, with Tuesday morning’s launch of the new mac1.metal ECS instance type. In something of a departure from Amazon’s usual cloud fare, the new instance types aren’t virtual machines at all—they’re Mac Mini systems, bolted in pairs to 1U rack-mount sleds.
No, these aren’t Apple Silicon systems—the Minis in question are the Intel-based model, each with a Core i7-8700B 6c/12t CPU, 32GiB RAM, and 10Gbps network interface. The mac1.metal instances don’t offer local storage, instead relying on Elastic Block Storage (EBS) accessed at 8Gbps via high-speed Thunderbolt 3. Customer provisioning, billing, and out-of-band management are handled via
